Inmates at correctional facilities have begun to regard access to a telephone to be a valuable privilege. Years ago, correctional facilities (prisons, jails and the like) made a few telephones available at a central location. To ensure that the inmates said nothing inappropriate, correctional officers (or, more colloquially, “guards”) stood by or listened on nearby telephones to inmate conversations.
Soon, however, correctional facilities began to install automated call placement systems (ACPs) with distributed telephones, perhaps with a telephone in each inmate's cell. Denied their convenient central location, correctional officers began to be required to monitor conversations more closely. Controls (such as individual access codes) began to be put into place to ensure that only inmates who had earned the privilege were allowed access to a telephone. Correctional officers began to use dedicated call monitoring telephones to monitor conversations.
ACPs then began to be fitted with recorders, so conversations could be stored and played back at will. The earliest recorders were multiple track tape recorders wherein each track was assigned to monitor each outbound trunk line. The recorders were placed into a continuous recording mode, so that all conversations were recorded. If a particular conversation or conversations were desired to be played back or archived, each conversation on each track was required to be scanned to find the right one(s).
More sophisticated call monitoring units eventually replaced tape recorders. These units employed disk storage in lieu of tape and stored conversations in digitized form on the disks. The correctional officer could then scan through the conversations taking place at a particular time, monitor a particular one of the conversations at length and search the call monitoring unit for the particular file containing the conversation in its entirety to allow him to hear the parts of the conversation he may have missed. Such a call monitoring unit is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/546.844, filed on Apr. 11, 2000, and entitled “System and Method for Remotely Controlling Automated Call Placement Call Monitoring Functions,” commonly assigned with the present Application and incorporated herein in its entirety.
Unfortunately, even with highly advanced call monitoring units such as that described in the above-mentioned patent application, the finite amount of storage space available on the data storage disks requires the unit to erase (or, more accurately, record over) existing conversations to make room for newly recorded conversations. As a result, important conversations are increasingly at risk of being overwritten, as each day the unit records new conversations. Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a call monitoring unit, and related method of recording, capable of more safely storing recorded conversations. Further, what is needed in the art is an automated call placement system incorporating the call monitoring unit or the method.